


Now We Are Free

by poisontaster



Category: Firefly
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Female Character of Color, Gen, Injury Recovery, Pre-Series, Prisoner of War, Sex for Favors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-28
Updated: 2005-12-28
Packaged: 2018-02-15 04:21:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2215650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He won't surrender, he can only be beat down. Set immediately after the War for Unification.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Now We Are Free

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firstgold](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstgold/gifts).



hundan=bastard  
bian shi=penny  
ta ma de=fuck me blind  
pi gu=ass

**Part I. The Thing in Front of You**

Some times, Zoë’s got to wonder if Mal will appreciate the irony of it.

She’s got plenty of time to think, these first ugly and unsleeping days when she’s not sure if he’s going to live or die. She _thinks_ he will—Mal’s just too damn cuss-stubborn to die—but the purple bellies victory cut something out of him. Something vital; more than the oceans of blood they all left in the scorched soil of Hera; almost all of it, in Mal’s case.

Ironic, she thinks again.

The Alliance did everything in their power to crush them, to wipe them forever from the face of the ‘verse.

But if not for Alliance victory, Alliance tech, Alliance doctors, Mal would be dead.

She don’t doubt Mal will see the irony, but she’ll bet her gun hand he won’t appreciate it.

They held the Valley long as they could; weeks after everyone else’d packed it up and hauled tail for home…not that full half of them had anyplace they could even call home at the end of it all. Didn’t matter. They’d been scared, starving, and near without hope as the Alliance brought more and more of their attention to bear…but they’d held.

Held until they broke.

Mal’s breath changes, hitches. At once, her focus snaps back. It’s the fifth or sixth time in the last hour. And each time, she’s afraid it’s the last…but he’s just sleeping—dreaming, more like, looking at the flinching pucker of his eyes. Zoë thinks of the sucking darkness of her own dreams and puts a quieting hand on his forehead.

Dimly, she remembers her own Tante ‘Zette doing much the same when one or another of the littles came down sick. She imagines ‘Zette’s amusement, if she were here to see Zoë now, nursemaiding for a man ain’t even hers, but just as quick, she sets the quasi-memory down sets it away and backs from it like it’s a dangerous weapon.

‘Cause that’s exactly what it is.

She doesn’t know what happened to her family, the ship. After a while, waves just stopped coming. Mostly, she tries not to think about it too much. Mostly, she succeeds. She’s had plenty of practice.

At her touch, Mal’s eyes flutter open, and his hand starts to come up for the grab, pausing only when shredded muscle and flesh protests. He goes a little white and his teeth shut hard on it—scream or whimper—and he blinks stupidly up at her. “Z…Zoë?”

She smiles, nothing like the wildfire relief that crackles through her. “Sir,” she says, casual like. “Good to have you back.”

“Was I gone?” Mal’s eyes clear and she watches his whole body still dangerously when he takes in the room, white and antiseptic, too clean to be anywhere safe. It took her much the same.

“Military camp, sir,” she offers, to his unspoken question. “For prisoners of war.”

“Ah, so it’s a ‘war’ now, is it?” Mal drawled, running his eyes over his bandages and stitches. Far too many of them, but that’s how it is with Mal. He won’t surrender, can only be beat down. “Last I heard, wasn’t nothing but a…what’d that purple belly call it again?” Mal lifts up the coverlet and looks worriedly underneath while Zoë looks aside and swallows a smile.

“A skirmish, sir.”

“Yeah, that’s the one.” Apparently satistfied that everything’s where he left it, Mal lies back again. Neither one of them comments on his shaking hands nor the glitter of sweat on his skin, but Zoë gets up to fetch him a cup of water from the dispenser.

At the panel, with her back safely to him, Zoë’s eyes close. _Deal with the problem in front of you,_ she thinks. _He’s alive. Awake. Anything else can come later. Deal with what’s in front of you._

She puts a straw in the cup and takes it back to him. His fragged arm is too weak to hold anything, and his left bristles with needles and sensors. Zoë holds the cup while he drinks.

“Thanks,” he says when he’s done. Zoë plops tiredly back into her chair next to him and wonders if now she’ll be able to sleep for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Probably not. Plenty of problems piling up behind this one.

She knows from his tone he means more than just the water; knows too how much it cost him to say it. “Don’t mention it, sir.”

 

**II. Someone to Carry You.**

Mal’s not happy about the bedpan.

She ain’t too crazy about it herself, but the first time Mal tries to get out of the rack on his own—at his own insistence, of course—his leg goes out from under him and opens back up in the fall. The Alliance doc comes and screams at him and Mal being Mal, he does his own fair share of yelling back, but the next time it comes up, they use the ‘damned pisspot’. Mal glares at her the whole time, daring her to say a word.

Zoë keeps her mouth shut, her eyes to herself, and wonders how in the ‘verse Mal managed to survive this long.

Hell, how any of them had.

Some part of her keeps marveling at it; _alive_. She hadn’t really expected that.

“Zoë, mind telling me why you’re the one doing for me, rather than some pretty nurse in a short skirt?”

“You trying to replace me, sir?” Zoë asks lightly. “I miss a spot on your last sponge bath?”

He flaps a hand at her, irritated and embarrassed both. “You know what I mean, woman.”

“Didn’t think much of letting you wake up among strangers, sir.” Zoë meets his eyes blandly but steadily. He’ll read and understand the unspoken _don’t ask me_ in her expression. He’s good at things like that. They both are.

It’s not a question of shame. Shame’s one of the shiny bits that gets scraped off pretty quick, ‘specially down in the muck. _Prices exist to be paid,_ her Mama’d been fond of saying. She paid and she don’t feel a damn bit sorry ‘bout it, but if he asks, she’ll answer, and he doesn’t want the answer. Not really.

He opens his mouth, and she sees his pigheadedness war with the rest. For a change, pigheaded don’t win. “Huh.”

Sometimes she ain’t sure about it herself, why she’s still dragging in his wake, watching his back. Habit, maybe, same as she keeps checking exits and clearing doorways. Same as she keeps waking to the rhythms of watch rotation every few hours, or reaches under her pillow for a gun that’s no longer there.

They aren’t cruel for the most part, the men that run the camp. Some ways, she thinks cruel might be better. Might give some indication that they _matter_. But that, she supposes, ain’t the party line. For all intents and purposes, Browncoats _don’t_ matter. They’re…an inconvenience. An annoyance. Like bugs. Wayward and misguided children more to be pitied than punished. Never mind that very soullessness, that _don’t matter_ is what they was fighting against in the first place.

Nevertheless, it’d cost her a bit of something to make this deal, to be allowed to watch his back just a while longer. Just until he could crawl or walk his own self.

_And then what?_

Zoë’s never shied from much. Even so, that question fills her with a hazy foreboding and makes her prickle in her skin. She’d wanted to leave behind chaos for something clear-cut. And for a time, she had that. But now it’s gone, and what she has left is time, old instincts and habits that ain’t much good no more, and Mal.

“Anyway, hospital’s shorthanded.”

“Well, then.” Mal struggled up in the rack, careful not to put too much weight on his bad arm. Doc’d done a good job, though. Wouldn’t even be a scar, when it was done. Considering what it’d looked like before, it was damn near a miracle. “Ain’t you all kinds of lucky? Walk out of this with a whole new trade.”

She smiled, which was his intention. “Better at ending lives than saving them, sir.”

His smile is taut and humorless. They all are, of late. “Ain’t we just.”

 

**III. Once You Find Serenity**

“How’s the leg?”

Irritably he jabs his makeshift cane at the powdery soil of the yard. “Just shiny.” He takes another two limping steps, dragging his bad leg behind. It’s a struggle not to sound as out of breath as he feels. The pain helps. “I love the feeling that someone hollowed my bones with a hot wire and replaced it with battery acid. I find it…” He takes a deep breath. “Refreshing.”

Zoë casts him an ironic look. “ _Must_ be feeling better, all this complaining.”

Mal pauses and squints up into the sun. It feels good on his skin, like it’s been years. Hell, maybe it has been. “Well, day’s early yet. Could pencil in a touch of the vapors later, you’d so druther.”

“Don’t go fainting on my ‘count.” Zoë laughs and he realizes it’s the first time she’s done that in a good long while. He looks at her, _really_ looks at her, and sees the stuff he missed, wrapped up in his own funk. “We’re a bit short on smelling salts at the moment.”

She moves easy enough, thumbs tucked under a belt strangely empty of weapons, but there’s new sprinkles of white in dark tight-bunched curls and harsh new lines around her eyes ain’t caused by the sun. Hard to tell in the shapeless camp grays, but he thinks she’s thinner, too, bones staring out of her wrists and her collarbones.

 _This is on their tally too,_ he thinks and the simmering low-boil in the pit of his stomach, that never leaves him these days, burns a little hotter. _Maybe better they should’ve killed us all, ‘stead of killing us by inches. Oh, but I ‘spose that wouldn’t be **civilized**._

His mouth’s felt sour since he woke here; ain’t quite sure if it’s the medicines, or just the taste of defeat. It’s bitter, though. He spits into the dust. Then it’s back to lurching around the yard, counting exits and guards and weapons, Zoë walking silent and watchful on his weak side. He don’t yet rightly know if escape's in the works, but he ain’t yet so broke he dismisses the possibility. ‘Sides, it keeps his mind on something other than the pain.

“Hey. You.”

There’s near a thousand folk in the camp. Coming out of the hospital, he felt surprised so many made it, and then immediately felt disloyal for thinking it. Even worse when he realizes how many of these faces he knows, glimpsed piecemeal through masks of mud, sweat and blood. This isn’t one of those faces.

Towards the end, he couldn’t be picky about who’d come under him. They’d only been holding it together by the skin of their teeth anyway, and sometimes not even that. Anybody was another body to throw into the gap, to try and hold, try and stick… Until. Always until, never defined.

Still, looking at the fleshy belligerent mug of the hump in front of him, Mal knew he’d of kicked this kid just on g.p.

“Hey,” he says and turns to face the kid, leaning on his cane. “Me.”

The wordplay confuses the kid, and it takes him a sec to think his way through it. Meantime, Zoë takes a step, increases the space ‘tween them. “I know you,” he says finally. His voice is surly as his face and he sounds like he’s from Whitefall or thereabouts. “You’re the hump told everyone we could hold off the Alliance. You told ‘em we could hold that gorram Valley, you motherless pusbucket liar. I know you.”

“Well, I don’t know you,” Mal says, conversational. “Why’nt we keep it that way?”

Couple of his knuckledragger friends are starting to wander this way now, all of ‘em with more jaw than brains. This is gonna get ugly real fast and he’s in no condition for anything drawn out, even with Zoë at his back.

Doesn’t have to wait long; kid makes a growl in his throat and lunges. Mal balances on his one good leg and reverses the cane, punting it hard and final into the hump’s belly. Kid’s eyes get so wide it’d be comical if’n it weren’t so serious, and he goes down, gasping and choking and puking up on himself. Mal twirls the cane again and clips him under the jaw, knocking him ass over teakettle in the dust.

Zoë’s got problems of her own—three of them (and he’s a little insulted by that, gorram it)—and another hump’s coming at him and he’s got just about no time to react. Hump hits him and his bad leg crumples like weak tin, dumping them both in the dirt. He holds onto the cane, though; gets it between him and Ugly—and boy, is he—forcing him far enough back that Mal can get his good leg up and his boot in. Hump gets in a lucky shot to the jaw and an accidental elbow to the puckered weal of healing thigh muscle that makes the world go all white and lightning-edged.

Some tussling, then he gets the leverage and room to kick. Hump moves the wrong way, and his heel ends up catching him right ‘cross the jaw. Sound of his neck breaking is like the gunshot crack of ice on a frozen lake. Mal freezes and that’s ‘bout when the guards decide to step in and break them all apart, lazy _hundan_.

“Gorram Browncoats,” the private that hauls Mal up grumbles. He digs his fingers into the scar tissue on his shoulder and Mal squirms.

“Bring them,” a new voice says, cutting in over the babble. It’s rather high, disinterested and cold. “Don’t hurt them.”

 

**IV. Remember I Love You.**

“I must say, Zoë, I am disappointed,” the Lieutenant says, and folds his hands lightly on the blotter of his desk. His tag reads Jiang, but he’s ‘bout as brown as Zoë, and if he’s really a Jiang, Mal’ll eat his shiny hat. More like he’s one of those that changed their name as to suck up to the Powers That Be. Lot of those about, ‘specially on the Alliance side. “I expected better of you.”

“Just following the doc’s orders,” Zoë says, mulish, while Mal just looks from her to the purple belly. He’s aware he’s missing some pieces here, and he’s feeling more than a little uneasy ‘bout what they add up to. Never did like puzzles much, him. “Didn’t start looking for no trouble.”

“Always do seem to find us, though,” Mal interjects lazy like. “S’pose that means something?”

They both ignore him. He hates that. “I have put myself to some pain for you,” Jiang observes. “With no reward to myself except the occasional pleasure of your company. Starting schoolyard scuffles with the malcontents imprisoned here hardly seems a fit way to repay my largesse.”

Zoë’s head tilts, inquiring.

“Ungrateful,” Mal says, lounging back in his chair like his hands aren’t shackled behind him by about fifteen pounds of iron, pulling on his sore shoulder, and like his leg don’t ache like a hellhound been chewing on it. “He’s telling you you’ve been ungrateful.”

Zoë’s jaw lengthens, but she bends her neck and he don’t think he’s ever seen her do that to no one. “I’m not ungrateful,” she murmurs.

“Well why the hell not?” Mal demands. “Ain’t too much round here to be grateful for, far as I can see it.”

“Mal—“ Zoë’s voice is a warning.

“Mal, what?” he drawls. Then the _biàn shì_ drops. “ _Ta ma de_.”

 

**V. Over the Volcano’s Edge (Meet the Man).**

” _This?_ This is how…” he sputters, at a loss for how to adequately finish that sentence.

“It was the only way, sir.” Zoë’s eyes look straight ahead, some point several inches past the back of Mal’s skull. He knows that look. He’s eyeballed his share of superior officers with a look much like it, and he doesn’t appreciate it being directed his way.

“Then you should have let me die!”

That draws her gaze, burning and furious. “I didn’t find that an acceptable option. _Sir_.”

“But you did find it acceptable to go kissing some purple belly’s _pi gu_?”

Zoë’s been at his side so long, he’s forgot what it’s like to be on the other side of her. He remembers it when she shoves him into the barracks wall. His punishment was the doc withholding his pain meds; the movement rockets off another glaring red explosion of pain, one that stops his breath off in his throat. “This isn’t just about _you_ , sir,” Zoë growls through gritted teeth. “To a lot of people here, you’re a gorram hero! The one that kept us going, long after anyone else’d told us to give up and pack it all for home…”

The bitterness is back in his mouth, worse than ever. “That don’t make me a hero,” he says, his voice failing him so that it only comes out a whisper. “That just makes me some fool got a bunch a folk killed. Case you didn’t notice, _Private_ , we lost the war.”

“Yes we did,” Zoë says, that impenetrable armor of calm closed around her again. “And that’s exactly why we couldn’t afford to lose you too. Sir.”

 

**VI. We’re Fragile Creatures.**

Their pardons come down just in time for Christmas; little bit of holiday cheer, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood dictatorship. The newly formed Parliament’s approval rating jumps a record twenty-four points in the polls among the Core Planets polled.

Feels good to have a gun on her belt again, Zoë thinks, even if they did keep all the bullets. There’s mud still in the stock, and a bit of rust on the barrel, but nothing she can’t fix with a little time and care. She settles it on her hip to her liking then looks over at Mal.

She’d expected to find a bit of satisfaction in his expression, but instead, she don’t see much of anything at all. Looks mostly like someone gut punched him when he wasn’t looking…which she wouldn’t put past a one of the guards still on duty. Not a one of ‘em liked Mal much, and that’s a fact. But that isn’t it.

“Sir?” she asks, coming a bit closer to his side. He’s sitting on a bench near the doors, scuffed coat held in both his hands and his cane disregarded across the tops of his boots.

His thumb traces over the coat’s nap a moment longer before he shakes himself. “Nothing,” he avers and gets to his feet, only a trifle clumsy. “Let’s go.”

“Sir, your cane…”

“Don’t need it,” he says grimly, kicking it to the side where it clatters unheeded. He tosses something small and shiny after it. After a moment, she sees it’s his cross, the little silver one he’s always wore on a chain around his neck. He slings the coat around his shoulders and puts his arms through the sleeves. “I’ma walk out of here, I’d best do it on my own two feet.”

Zoë doesn’t say anything, just puts her shoulder under his. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is written for the 2005 [](http://serenity-santa.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://serenity-santa.livejournal.com/)**serenity_santa**. Chapter headers come from the series. The title is also the title of a song from the Gladiator soundtrack by Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard.


End file.
